07:57 – Forty-five years ago today. Four dead in Ohio. Allison B. Krause, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, William Knox Schroeder, and Sandra Lee Scheuer. Kids minding their own business. Murdered by the government. Never forget.
Barbara mentioned yesterday that she prefers Jefferson/West Jefferson to Sparta. I agree, so that’s where we’ll focus our attention. It’s 83 miles and about 1.5 hours from our house in Winston-Salem, which is about as isolated from big-city troubles as one can get on the East Coast. The nearest towns of any size are Sparta, about 30 miles ENE, and Boone, NC, about 25 miles SW.
More science kit stuff today.
Just remember going smaller is a big change. When I moved from they nearby major city to Smallville it took a little getting used too. Until recently, the only two places that delivered food to our house were two big pizza chains.
Where we are, we have a choice of Internet providers, fast and unreliable or slow and reliable. A friend who lives a couple of miles away from us would have to cut down trees to get wireless Internet or do without. That friend still has a Smallville mailing address, and may even be inside the boundaries of the town of Smallville. So there is a distinct cutoff between where high speed Internet is available and were it is not avaliable.
I’ve thought of moving to someplace a little bit more rural outside of Smallville, but the lack of high speed Internet is a deal breaker for us.
Smallville is huge (population 10,000) compared to some of the places you are talking about.
Yeah, these places are usually somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500 population, which is large enough to suit both of us. We wouldn’t be missing much. There’s good medical/dental/vet care, fast-food chains (not that we care…), supermarket and drugstore and hardware chains, a choice of regular restaurants, a Walmart Super Center, etc. etc. Even a Tractor Supply. I want high-speed Internet and natural gas, which limits us to the town limits and close environs, but otherwise I’m pretty adaptable. Tourism is big business up there, so they have to have the amenities that people expect.
“I want high-speed Internet and natural gas, which limits us to the town limits and close environs … ”
Are you likely to run foul of local ordinances that would interfere with your chemistry-kit business? Perhaps outside the town proper would be more “free” for entrepreneurship.
Bulk liquid propane is a good alternative to natural gas, if there is a provider within reasonable distance. We went that route even though we live in the suburbs, as the NG monopolist wouldn’t cover the (for us, prohibitive) cost of laying a spur pipeline to our house. We did away with the old diesel tank, installed a rainwater cistern in its place, and had the propane people supply and install a 2500L underground tank. Other than an annual safety inspection (basically checking the zincs), it’s no mess, no fuss…
We use propane for heating and hot water … it’s noticeably more expensive than natural gas, although it’s a difficult comparison to make because of recent price volatility, with huge month-to-month price swings.
I should add, however, that we also have a 25KW auto-start generator that runs from the propane tank, so if you plan for a generator at the new house, going propane instead of natural gas and gasoline/diesel generator may be more cost effective. While you can buy a natural gas generator, in any long term outage, you can’t count on natural gas supply staying up. Probably better reliability than the electric power mains, though, as the natural gas system is underground.
OFD has yet another phone interview for a gig with this infrastructure:
http://www.uvm.edu/~vacc/?Page=resources/clusterspecs.php
I did pretty much the meat and potatoes of this back at IBM; we shall see. That supported DOD-related chip fabrication; this one is an academic research cluster.
“Four dead in Ohio.”
My dad and I had arguments all the time back then about all this stuff, but that night when he brought the paper home at supper, even he was shocked: “They shot four kids out there today!”
Me and some of the other high skool kidz had ourselves been out protesting and led a walkout of the school, despite the bullhorn-shouted objections of the principal and the police chief. Then we rolled on into Boston, twenty miles east, and did the same thing there, with thousands of college kidz. Five years later I was myself in Cambodia, haha.
Let’s not forget these kids, either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_State_killings
Usually forgotten; their anniversary comes up on the 15th.
I should add, however, that we also have a 25KW auto-start generator that runs from the propane tank, so if you plan for a generator at the new house, going propane instead of natural gas and gasoline/diesel generator may be more cost effective.
How big is your propane tank? Can the generator run for a month? Is a 25 kW generator one of those GM V6 motors or is that still a water cooled four cylinder?
“To keep a Boeing Dreamliner flying, reboot once every 248 days”
http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/01/boeing-787-dreamliner-software-bug/
Wow.
Wish I could get 248 days with my Linux desktop systems. Usually have to restart about every week or two. They occasionally fail going to sleep (suspend to RAM) or Hibernate (suspend to disk.) They DO restart cleanly, and haven’t corrupted any data… yet. Still, not very confidence inspiring.
I have an old isolated Windows 2k system that not been restarted in so long I can’t remember – at least a year, more like two. I think it was when I changed the CMOS battery. I only use it about once a week, and use Hibernate to turn it off. It also has never locked up or crashed in any way, although I did have to restart it almost every month on Patch Tuesday when MS supported W2k. Those were the days.
Yah, was thinking about this today. Even if I heard of it at the time, it meant nothing to me — I was in first grade, and if any teachers mentioned it all the way through high school, I don’t remember it. Wasn’t until I was in the Army that I found out anything meaningful about Kent State.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkg-bzTHeAk
The wife is going up to Dallas in the morning to check on her dad. I wonder if I need to go as a tail gunner?
@Lynn,
The season is open, get your bag limit….
nick
“If you draw it they will come”
Even if I was inclined to take Donald Trump seriously, he’s blown it with this one : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3067689/Donald-Trump-hammers-organizer-draw-Muhammed-contest-says-s-just-taunting-everybody-free-speech-debate-grows-following-Texas-shooting.html
I think we should be having another contest today, tomorrow, and every day after that. Let the bastards keep volunteering for euthanasia.
My dad and I had arguments all the time back then about all this stuff, but that night when he brought the paper home at supper, even he was shocked: “They shot four kids out there today!”
Me and some of the other high skool kidz had ourselves been out protesting and led a walkout of the school, despite the bullhorn-shouted objections of the principal and the police chief. Then we rolled on into Boston, twenty miles east, and did the same thing there, with thousands of college kidz. Five years later I was myself in Cambodia, haha.
I was a high school senior in Berkeley, California when this happened. We were not particularly surprised as we had gone through People’s Park (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Park_(Berkeley)#May_15.2C_1969:_.22Bloody_Thursday.22) the previous year. The National Guard was quartered on the school football field. My sister was in junior high at the time and, when some demonstrators ran into the school to escape tear gas, they tear gassed the whole school. My views about government were formed during this time.
Rick in Portland
How big is your propane tank? Can the generator run for a month? Is a 25 kW generator one of those GM V6 motors or is that still a water cooled four cylinder?
500 gallon tank nominal, but the propane company will only do an 80% fill, figure 400 gallons useful. A 1000 gal tank would be better but couldn’t be installed here due to zoning.
Generator consumption depends on load, of course. At 25% load, I recall the spec being around 2 to 2.5 gal/hour. At max load it’s perhaps 6.5-7 gal/hour, but running everything in the house, including the AC, oven, all the lights, etc., never got it over 40% load.
The prime mover is a Nissan 4 cyl. water cooled engine, and the alternator is a Chinese product. Engine says “Made in Japan” which is good, compared with “Made in China.”
Longest it has run is about 3.5 days during one of the periodic ice storms we receive in Northern VA. But, since we are on well and septic, without electrical power it would be difficult to stay here during a multi-day outage.
My plan, in the event we have a long term outage (week +) is to run it an hour in the AM and an hour in the PM. Even in the winter that would prevent the house from becoming an ice box.
What can throw a monkey wrench in this plan is that the propane company computer predicts when you will need a refill and a couple of times we’ve been down to 10 % before they would send the truck out. So, if we have a week long ice storm outage that occurs when the tank is down to 10 or 15%, things would get difficult.
“My views about government were formed during this time.”
We are about the same age, I guess, maybe I’m a year younger? I was a junior when this stuff went down; you out in Berserkely, and me in Beantown. I tend to think now that the big attraction for me and many others was the excitement, the adrenalin rushes, and goofing on the cops and other authorities. But their response was anything but playful.
Hell, it’s young kids, mainly, back then anyway, holding hands, dancing around, singing, or whatever, and they rolled out the tear gas, shotguns and rifles for us. Why not stomp on peaceful protestors? Not long before that, I’d seen “Doctor Zhivago” on the big screen and was gobsmacked at the Russian police cavalry riding down peaceful protestors. Then, it wasn’t that long ago we had that cop out in Kalifornia just blithely spraying kneeling protestors with that pepper stuff, right in their faces, and he later had the gall to apply for disability and stress payments from the trauma he went through. Didn’t look very traumatic for him at the time.
It’s one thing if people are violently rioting and destroying property and assaulting other people. But to pound on kids who are peaceful about it is ridiculous, and it had blowback later in the Bolshevik revolution, and again during the breaking off of the violent SDS and Weatherman factions here.
Then you have the online Maoist rag Salon justifying the destruction of police cruisers as savvy political strategy. Sure, if you want the cops to retaliate with ever-increasing violence later. And then we’ll have ourselves a major violent pissing contest in this country. Cops keep beating and shooting people and pretty soon people are gonna start shooting back, on a big scale, too. This will not end well.
Couldn’t happen here
Yeah, I forgot to mention the “Bonus Army,” but I have brought it up here in other, sorta related contexts in the past. When Dugout Doug and his toadies, Ike and Patton, brought armed troops, rifles and machine guns against the veterans and burned out their families from their tent and shack “city” in the Anacostia.
However, many of the 20-million veterans here are armed and experienced. They can be rooted out individually from their homes as has occurred several times already that we know about, but the outrages are gonna create eventual mass blowback.
And don’t forget United States Marine Corps major general Smedley Darlington Butler …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler#Business_Plot
In November 1934, Butler claimed the existence of a political conspiracy by business leaders to overthrow President Roosevelt, a series of allegations that came to be known in the media as the Business Plot.
Linux uptime: For servers, basically forever, except that nowadays you have regular updates, some of which (kernel updates) want the machine rebooted.
But for Linux clients, sleeping and suspending has never worked really reliably. I have Linux on a laptop that I use constantly. Most of the time, I can close the lid, and the thing suspends; open the lid and it wakes up. Once in a while, it wakes up, but leaves the display turned off, or goes right back to sleep even with the lid open.
Anyhow, I’m pretty surprised that airplanes run 248 days without ever being powered off. I would have thought that some of the routine maintenance would involved powering down the whole machine. Apparently not…
Anyhow, I’m pretty surprised that airplanes run 248 days without ever being powered off. I would have thought that some of the routine maintenance would involved powering down the whole machine. Apparently not…
Airplanes are probably just like a microwave after a power outage. Somebody has to reset the clock or else it just sits there and blinks 12:00am at you.